VitalWatch

Note: As of 2.0, this now has a GUI configuration menu. It has so many options they may take up your entire screen.

VitalWatch was a mod that was based on an older mod called HealthWatch , with the addition of watching mana as well as health, and a better notification frame. My version has almost no simularities to the old VitalWatch mod, as I have taken the concept far and beyond what it once was...

Now, what IS VitalWatch you ask? Well, simply put, VitalWatch alerts you to your own low or critical health or mana, or to a party member or pet's health, using any combination of a centered large font frame, emotes, sounds, and party messages. It's so simple, a picture would be useless as best it does is display a bit of text. It currently has these features:

- Displays a message at the top center of your screen in large font alerting you who (yourself, party members, pets) has low health.

- Message to party/raid/say (configurable) when you (or optionally another party member's health) are in low or critical health or mana.
- Voice Emote / Regular Emote automatically played ("healme", "helpme", "oom", etc.) when in low or critical health or mana.

- If not already using an emote, additionally a sound can be automatically played to alert you when you (or optionally another party member's health) have low or critical health and/or mana.

- Can also alert when party members, your pet, and party member pets have low/critical health with centered alert messages and/or a sound played. This can be toggled on/off.

- New in 1.2: Can spam a channel with the same messages you get at the top of the screen so you can wake that darn healer up! This can be toggled on/off, and is set to OFF by default (of course).

- New in 1.7: You can make the sides around your screen flash red for low/critical health or blue for low/critical mana.

- New in 1.7: You can enable a heartbeat-like sound which gets more rapid as you lose health.

- New in 1.9: You can now watch raid members as well as party.

- New in 2.0: A log of recent events, and a ballizion new options.

- New in 2.1: You can now enable sounds per event (critical and low health or mana) which say the class name in the sound itself.

- New in 2.2: Aggro watching!

Changes in v2.3
- Lots more bug fixes, mostly with aggro watching. I've been testing it, and it's pretty smooth now.
- You can now select to only watch party and/or raid, ignoring player, when watching aggro.
- The old system of disabling messages sent out to channel was brought over from when VitalWatch had only slash commands. I've added a much simpler system. You can now disable channel messages for each event type.
- You can now select frames from different addons to send the message frame alerts to. Your options are: SCT, MSBT, Blizzard's Floating Combat Text, and BigWigs.

Changes in v2.2
- After extensive testing of my own, many bugs have been quashed. Hopefully no more errors.
- Heartbeat sound effect should once again work.
- Added aggro gained/lost alerts via BanzaiLib. You can use message frame alerts, emotes, sounds, and chat messages reporting aggro. Aggro sounds can also be played which tell you which class has aggro.

Changes in v2.11
- Fixed some bugs with the new ClassSounds. This should also fix the other errors which were probably caused by the Lua parser exploding.

Changes in v2.1
- Added Class Sounds, which are sounds for each event (critical and low health or mana) which say the class name in the sound itself.
- Fixed a small bug in VitalWatchOptions

Changes in v2.0
- BTS 2.0 ready
- Switched entirely to Ace2 and made into a FuBar plugin. VitalWatch will work without FuBar, of course.
- Message log, which shows the recent events. You can click on the event to target the unitid which triggered the health or mana event.
- Proper message queueing, there should be no spam now. If you don't like the default rate, you can change the rate to what you desire.
- Lots of fixes I should have uploaded a long time ago.

Changes in v1.92
- Needed the 3rd return from Metrognome:Status, not the 1st. Now the Heartbeat effect should work.
- GUI's in the making, but not yet ready for release.

Changes in v1.91
- Typo

Changes in v1.9
OK, I didn't commit seppuku, but I DID make a really big update!
- Cleaned up code, changed some database variable names. Your version should automatically update to the new names.
- Now using embedded Metrognome lib for Heartbeat sound effect.
- You can now watch raid members for health/mana with /vw raidwatch.
- You can now change which channel public messages are sent to with /vw msg chan. This defaults to PARTY as it always has been.
- You can now set the rate at which public messages and emotes are sent with /vw spamrate. This defaults to 0.5, or half a second per message or emote.
- And, yes, some extra changes to stop screen flashing when dead. Ugh.

Changes in v1.73
- I'm going to commit seppuku if this fix doesn't finally stop the screen flashing when dead.

Changes in v1.72
- Fixed some typos in settings which resulted in the wrong setting being toggled.
- Now using PLAYER_DEAD to disable screen flash and heartbeat effects upon death.

Changes in v1.7
Big update! You may need to do /vw reset if you have problems with your saved variables.

- You can now disable the Alert Frame in the top-center for health or mana if you so choose.
- Added some more options for tracking mana that were suppose to be there but weren't.
- New option: /vw screenflash health | mana, makes the sides of the screen flash red for low health or blue for low mana. Thanks to TNE_LowHealthWarning for the idea!
- New option: /vw heartbeat, enables a heartbeat-like sound which gets more rapid as you get lower in health. Thanks to TNE_LowHealthWarning for the idea!

Changes in v1.5
- All actions except large font alert frame should now be disabled if you are not in combat, or dead. Above all else, this should prevent "I am out of mana!" spam from healing/buffing inbetween fights.

Changes in v1.22
- Fixed all UNIT_HEALTH / UNIT_MANA bugs. Now it should correctly work even with mods that change the arguments.

Changes in v1.21
- Fixed a minor bug with an error occuring when a UNIT_HEALTH event happens without a valid argument (even though it should always have at least arg1). This only happens with MiniGroup2 (tests with Blizz, AcePerl, DUF fine), I'll have to look at their code more closely. Edit: Note that currently VitalWatch may not work with MiniGroup2 because of this error. I think it's a problem with MG2's code, but it may also be a problem with how I'm handling globals.

Changes in v1.2
- Have a bad healer? You can now spam party chat with the same messages you get sent for other party members, your own pet, and party member's pets. This defaults to OFF, of course.
- Your own pet and others pets are now tagged differently ( "my pet" vs "pet" )
- Fixed a few minor bugs.

Changes in v1.1
- I was bored, the servers are down, so I added pet & partypet support. Untested.

Changes in Pre-Ace
- Fixed some bugs, added a few options. These versions do not require Ace as a dependency.

Sorry everyone. Right now I am focusing 100% on TinyTip and haven't had time to do VitalWatch lovin'. It's next on my list to rewrite. 2.4 is also going to give me some new options when it comes to dealing with aggro, as well as configuration. I'm also planning on using the TinyTip modular approach to VitalWatch. I thank darkwraith007 for his assistance.

Originally posted by skyal I'm having the same issue. I wanted to configure things because I really don't want it announcing party chat that I'm low on health, especially when I'm on my healer.

I can't seem to get command line options to work, either, but I don't know exactly which ones this addon has, since I couldn't find a list, so I might've just not been trying the right things.

I got it to work! (using Burning Crusade, version 2.2.3) I truly believe Thrae should do some debugging and fix this issue or something so that its not so picky about where the libs are. I'll put what *should* work, and what I personally did, your mileage may vary of course.

Originally posted by darkwraith007
I load up VitalWatch v2.3 perfectly fine, using Burning Crusade v2.1.3 and everything seems to load fine, but upon entering the game, I only get a minimap icon that says "VitalWatch Log" and I can't click it or anything, only move it around. There is NO WAY for me to change the options, as it doesn't respond to command line, GUI, or anything else. It sorta works but there's no way to configure it, and I'm very frustrated by this.

I'm having the same issue. I wanted to configure things because I really don't want it announcing party chat that I'm low on health, especially when I'm on my healer.

I can't seem to get command line options to work, either, but I don't know exactly which ones this addon has, since I couldn't find a list, so I might've just not been trying the right things.

I load up VitalWatch v2.3 perfectly fine, using Burning Crusade v2.1.3 and everything seems to load fine, but upon entering the game, I only get a minimap icon that says "VitalWatch Log" and I can't click it or anything, only move it around. There is NO WAY for me to change the options, as it doesn't respond to command line, GUI, or anything else. It sorta works but there's no way to configure it, and I'm very frustrated by this.

Please let me know what's going on, or if its incompatible with v2.1.3 of WoW or TBC.

Many people have been having problems with the minimap button not responding to input or the command line not working.

Great Thanks! that also solved another problem I was having with a different addon

Originally posted by seyek @Daerien:

If you want to completely reset the settings for any addon, you will have to delete the file in your WTF folder. Go to .../World of Warcraft/WTF/Account/YOUR ACCOUNT NAME/Saved Variables and delete the files for Vital Watch.

If you want to completely reset the settings for any addon, you will have to delete the file in your WTF folder. Go to .../World of Warcraft/WTF/Account/YOUR ACCOUNT NAME/Saved Variables and delete the files for Vital Watch.

Originally posted by Qynova is there a command i can type in to get the configuration options instead of clicking on the mini map button? srry if this has been said above or below but i didnt see it

er... ya... what he said. I unchecked the "enable" option and now the minimap button has disappeared. So now I can't access it to turn it back on. Tried /vitalwatch /vitalwatch menu /vitalwatch options etc. Tried reinstalling and even switching user accounts hoping it would reset

What can I do to save my sanity?

Cheers

(PS-when it was on, it was exactly what I was looking for ty for the hard work).

@jdhas -- DeuceCommander only works if a mod uses AceConsole, and mine doesn't. As for missing VitalWatchOptions ... do you have the folder in C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Interface\Addons? Note that 2.1 also contains a tiny fix for VWO.